Living World / Evolution

In the beginning, wrote God in His epic, loosely autobiographical best seller, The Bible, the Lord made the heavens and the Earth. Pondering from the vile comfort of the Marriott in Hebron, Kentucky, I assumed that this single statement represented the bulk, if not the entirety, of creationist ideology. Hence the name, I reckoned in a flash of insight. God created everything; if something exists, then God created it. Yes, that's what they believe, those creationists.

A creationist group called Answers in Genesis, which believes in the literal, scientific truth of the Bible, has decided to spend $27 million building a creation museum only minutes away by cab from this unlovely spot. When it opens in May, the museum is going to try to dazzle people with the wonder, beauty, and sheer scientific cunning exhibited by God during that action-packed week when He willed everything that exists into being. Yet the museum's founders have chosen to set it in one of the few spots on Earth that could plausibly have been designed by chimpanzees.

There is another great irony to the project, it occurs to me as I finish my coffee and rise to meet my driver: that of God almost certainly not existing.

Exiting the Marriott into a hail of filthy light, I make a mental note to bring this up with someone.

Frankly, if I were given $27 million to build a creationist museum, I probably would fill the place with stuff from my apartment. There'd be some cans of beef broth, a nice pair of cuff links, and that Kiss Destroyer LP I borrowed from my sister in 1979 and never returned. Then I'd blow the money on a launch party for the ages and settle into a routine of wandering about the place in a peaked cap and a jacket with epaulets, saying, "Ah, yes, a sachet of Newman's Own Microwave Popcorn, yet another of God's creations and further testament to His majesty."

Patrick Marsh, the museum's actual designer, has gone a different route, and with results that I have to say are impressive. The place is huge, for one thing: 50,000 square feet of vaulted ceilings and animatronic dioramas in a rather groovy modernist structure that looks from the outside like a topflight NBA arena as imagined by the makers of The Flintstones. The exterior is rendered in an oddly tasteful, faux-prehistoric faux stone, as is most of the interior—though the cave effect is somewhat compromised by a dizzying profusion of top-of-the line plasma TV screens.

What's really impressive, however, is what Marsh has managed to do with the place intellectually. Two hours into my tour of the Creation Museum, I am visited by the startling realization that I, so hard-core an atheist as to make Richard Dawkins look like the Virgin Mary, have yet to actually, um, disagree with anything I'm seeing.

Now, don't get me wrong. Patrick Marsh and his creationists have some decidedly wacky—I would go so far as to say demonstrably false—ideas. They believe the universe is only 6,000 years old. They believe that dinosaurs and humans lived not only contemporaneously but in blissful harmony. They believe that when the Bible says that God created the whole cosmic shebang in six days, it means six days of 24 hours each—even though, to start with, there was no sun for the Earth to revolve around at that point in Genesis. Strangest of all, to me, they believe that God rested on the seventh day of creation not because he had to (fatigue is apparently not a word in His vocabulary), but with the express purpose of inspiring mankind by example not to go into work on Sundays. A commandment, presumably, would have been too heavy-handed.